Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/38

 20 A History of Art in Sardinia and Jutxea. and, finally, the Corsicans, or Corsi, inhabited the extreme north section of the island. We will now pass in review the monuments known as nuraghs, dwelling upon their arrangement and mode of construction, and, assisted by numerous documents, it will be easy to give a summary of them, the difficulty will be in endeavouring to determine their real nature and the end for which they were erected. 1 § 4. — Nûraghs. The buildings that we are about to describe are proper to Sar- dinia ; nowhere else are they found precisely similar, or with details of so typical a character that delineation of them is rendered 1 Before we proceed further, we wish to record through what instrumentality we have been enabled to bring to this portion of our work a thoroughness that could never have been attained otherwise, because opportunities for visiting the part of Sardinia in which these monuments are found were denied us. In the foremost ranks of those who volunteered to be our fellow-workers must be placed M. Léon Gouin, a mining engineer who has been settled in Sardinia for the last twenty years, and who has taken the keenest interest in its antiquities, having brought together a number of curios that can hold their own against the Cagliari and Sassari museums. M. Gouin, with a readiness to be of service which we cannot sufficiently praise, not only placed himself at our disposal, but also pressed into the work his friend M. Alphonse Baux, as warm a student of Sardinian antiquities as he himself, and supplied us with drawings of all the objects in his collection. He took, moreover, the measurement and a carefully drawn plan of two nuraghs, which served us as types for that class of monuments. This is not all. In his letters, and during two flying visits which he paid to the French capital, both in his conversation and in answering the questions which we rained upon him, no less than in treating us to his unbiassed opinion upon the questions at issue in regard with these strange monuments at present so imperfectly known, he has laid us under extreme obligations. We are glad also of this opportunity for acknowledging our thanks to M. Vivanet, chief inspector of the Sardinian exploration, and M. Pais, keeper of the Cagliari museum. To M. Vivanet we are indebted for photographs of the most important bronzes in the Cagliari museum. It is owing to these that we are able to reproduce the small figures scattered in these pages in a manner unsurpassed by any that have gone before. Of M. Pais it will be enough to say that he is widely known as an eminent scholar and critic, and that he has been our chief guide in this study, not only in his published works, but also in the valuable volumes which he placed at our disposi- tion, and which it would have been vain to try and find elsewhere ; and last, not least, in dispelling our doubts on certain points about which we were uncertain. It is through him likewise that we are indebted to Messrs. Crespi and Nissardi for the benefit of their experience in this field of inquiry, including a number of capital drawings.